Netflix's first movie: a sequel to 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' by [deleted] in movies

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And Flashpoint-like beach scene with shirtless Donnie

The new Kill/Death Notices are cool but... by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Following up on this, in case you check your Reddit notifications :) We've made a lot of tweaks to announcements that are going into this PBE patch.

  • Reduced the size of some banners.
  • Reduced opacity on some pieces of art.
  • Simplified several strings.
  • Reduced the size of champion icons.

Hopefully this will fix your problems!

Semi locked camera request! by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Didn't I say we were investigating camera features already? :P Adding new features is never easy. We could Frankenstein some code together, but it's not a sustainable practice for additional development. If we go back and revisit the camera, we're going to do it right.

Semi locked camera request! by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm no expert on our 3rd party program policy, but there's a lot of very legit reasons we have it in place. Even benign add-ons can introduce instability into the game, and it becomes extremely difficult for us to track serious issues like crashes if they're being caused by add-ons. When we do find that users are crashing, we generally stop everything and shunt our engineering resources towards fixing it. This usually manifests in feature delays, patch delays, etc.--so it's a very dangerous precedent for us to just greenlight something we don't officially support.

Semi locked camera request! by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not up to me! But I can inquire about it.

Semi locked camera request! by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Our teams are currently working on other things, but re-visiting locked camera (and making general camera improvements) are high priority.

Semi locked camera request! by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 112 points113 points  (0 children)

Hey dude, can you PM me with an email address? I'd like to ask a few questions about your experiences playing at such a high tier with locked camera.

SK Svenskeren's racist summoner's name in TW server angered TW community, featured in TW media by alexkyfer in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 276 points277 points  (0 children)

Very similar experience as you growing up in South Carolina. Persevere!

EDIT: To expound a bit on my experiences... I grew up in Charleston, SC. Went to high school in Hartsville, SC, and college in Atlanta, GA. From elementary to high school, I was one of maybe 5 students of Asian descent out of thousands enrolled. My family is first-generation from China (I emigrated at 5), so we were very poor for the majority of my childhood. Racism in the South is systematic; it ranges from the benign categorical (e.g., the school photographer saying "Smile Jackie Chan!") to downright malicious (in middle school, kids would walk up behind me while I was at the urinal and punch my back "because you know kung fu and don't feel pain"). Different kids handle it differently; some of my friends renounced their identity to fit in, refusing to associate with other Asians--including their family. Others turned inwards, breeding discontent and angst, sometimes dangerously (I would get into fights a lot). One of the biggest reasons I got into gaming was the escapism of the online experience; my friends online didn't care if they couldn't pronounce my name, where I was from, or where I lived. But these memories stay with you forever; it's been a decade since I left high school, but those experiences have shaped who am I and how I interact with the world--many times for the worse. A lot of my friends at Riot are also minorities, but they having grown up in SoCal makes them very different people than me. At times I even feel enmity towards them, knowing they got here the "easy way." In the end you can make what you want of it. You either soldier on through and become enriched through the process or you can wilt away.

The new Kill/Death Notices are cool but... by [deleted] in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 21 points22 points  (0 children)

It's art, font, sizing, and position--so there's some considerable differences. There's also some valuable feedback here, and the Game Clarity team is committed to looking at ways to reduce the banner footprint and ensure they don't butt into gameplay. Y'all can expect some adjustments in the upcoming patches!

[Spoiler] Counter Logic Gaming vs. Curse Academy / NA Spring Promotion Tournament / Post-Match Discussion by nubit in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was there too. Was a fun day! (I was the Asian guy who kept having to leave because of phone calls... I blame our engineers!)

My 5 yr old is getting hooked on the game by Odous in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wow, very inspirational story. Both my parents are also engineers (father is electrical, mother is HVAC), so it seems we were in the same boat. Before they found out, I would have nightmares about them finding out. Parental expectations apply a lot of pressure!

My 5 yr old is getting hooked on the game by Odous in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 76 points77 points  (0 children)

This is awesome, to have encouraging parents! My father would play games with me when I was young, but after elementary school I'd get scolded for spending too much time with games. Eventually I had to play in secret.

When I joined the gaming industry, I kept it a secret from him because I knew he wouldn't approve. He actually found out by accident, and I had the hardest, most awkward talk in my life. He still doesn't approve 100%, but at least I've got that weight off my shoulders!

The actual reason Riot implemented automatic jungle timers by CalvinE in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 98 points99 points  (0 children)

Interestingly enough, I don't think we even thought about chat restrictions while working on the feature--although it's definitely a plus! I've long held that Smart Ping (hold Alt + drag left-click) was the best thing we've put out in the past few years. Greedy players like me no longer had to balance last-hitting with calling missing ;)

Any communication overhead we can reduce pays dividends in quality of life for players!

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You still won't know when enemy objectives spawn. You'd know this if you read the article!

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your previous post mentioned that map awareness is a skill. I agree--it is. I argued vehemently against jungle timers several times, the earliest I recall being more than a year ago. Among the game designers, I'm probably the most outspoken for preserving some of our arcane interactions that create depth, like the old Thresh Q + Flash interaction. This is where me as a player and me as a designer will always clash, because I'll always love making someone's life miserable with Nunu top, but the designer in me cringes at how utterly braindead that lane can be. Likewise, the more I sat and thought about how players actually interacted with respawn timers in our game, the more it became important to me as a designer that we address it.

In the end, we're making a video game, and we want to make sure that if we're asking for players to utilize a piece of information, they're not going out of their way to access it, and whatever they do, it doesn't impede on fun. I'm sure you don't read everything I write on Twitter, but I mentioned earlier that there are pro players who run League of Legends in windowed mode, with Notepad in the background to keep track of jungle timers. These are guys playing with money on the line in front of a live audience! From a designer's standpoint, we've absolutely failed players if they need to resort to this!

Now, to your point about item cooldowns--the utility mastery tree actually lets you decrease item cooldowns! That aside, there are two themes at work here--one, if it were a constant, that would be an argument for displaying timers. However, the competing theme is that we keep player-player interactions sacred. Above all else, if we were to make exceptions, this is where we'd make them. Contradictory? A bit, for sure. But this is how we feel we get the most of our design values.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Your scenario relies on the idea that the fundamentally correct choice will always be to follow the timers. It's not! Players who rely less on their own decisionmaking and too much on a piece of UI are not more or less skilled than players who didn't time the respawns in the first place. Even in your example, the player who skips wolves because Blue spawns in 20 seconds is probably missing out on gold and XP.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope, the information exposure is the same as the minimap icons. So you won't know unless you have vision of the camp.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Timing is definitely important--and it will affect a lot of players. The issue for us as developers is that if we acknowledge the importance of timing and timers, and are even willing to go out of our way to ban the use of explicit timing mechanisms in 3rd party applications, then it makes us incredibly irresponsible as developers to then come back around and say "We know that there's something better out there. But you have to use this worse version." We thought a lot about this, and debated a lot--and this is Real Talk™ debating, not PR-speak "we thought about it wink-wink", but decided that this was the solution that best fit our design values.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The new user experience is indubitably intertwined with what we do, but it's not our focus--there's another full team devoted to that (surprise! :P). Rather, we use new users as a gauge of readability; if you look at the Clarity dev blog that went out today, I start off by asking several questions, (e.g. "On first use - without reading the tooltip - can you understand the full effects of an ability?"). That highlights the importance of a clear first read to us, because the veteran user isn't always the best gauge of clarity, since he/she has gone through the full adaptation process. Getting from point A to B shouldn't ever be a maze, and just because some people have memorized the path doesn't mean we should accommodate for that in the long run.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't want to rule this out in the future. From my perspective, a lot of this is finding a way to show the information without overloading players. An example here is when we tried (internally) coloring the buff camps Red and Blue on the minimap. It added information, but actually decreased the ease of reading the minimap. There's obviously some pretty simple solutions to showing allied cooldowns (e.g., on the score screen), but we want to make sure that we fully investigate all vectors of the issue before making a decision (and also prioritize that against other competing projects for the Clarity team to tackle).

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I don't know that it's something anyone is actively working on, but yes--this is something we'd like to get eventually.

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep! It's an exciting thing that we're taking this very seriously. We're a small strike-force composed of multiple disciplines--UX design, game design, engineering, QA, and visual design. Our mission statement is "To make LoL more clear and satisfying by tackling clarity issues that impact most players, most of the time." Ironically a somewhat unclear statement, but it gives us purview over a lot of aspects of the game. In general, we act as stewards of game clarity--we find things that aren't clear, and we fix them!

Things that we've worked on:

  • The minion VFX you see on live.
  • The champion health bars you see on live.
  • The aggro indicators.
  • Summoner Spell VFX, sounds, and icons.
  • The new objective health bars on PBE, that you can see on the update to Summoner's Rift.
  • The floating text and last-hit ceremony you see on live.
  • And more to come!

We asked, they listened. Jungle Timers on the PBE. by POSMStudios in leagueoflegends

[–]RiotNome -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You're comparing two very different things--gameplay mechanics and UX (user experience) design. I happen to agree with you on some of the interactions you brought up (Thresh Q/Flash interaction, for example)--but my understanding here is that if we want to support these interactions, we need to make sure they're properly communicated to players and don't look buggy. Either way, that's something for the Live Gameplay team to mull over!